The Chronicle of Georgia, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: My book is a finalist for the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Prize . Housing The Atlantic has a piece on how difficult and user-unfriendly most smart home technology still is. This was true when Gizmod...

I am deeply frustrated with my inability to stick to the plan and do this post once a month. But I will really make an effort from now on because the more I delay the more links (and tabs) pile on and I end up not being able to share everything. Bookmarks related to tech and web development Webmentions by Joe Crawford. Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs by Nolan Lawson. Radical Web . Bot or not? by Oleh. Charity Digital Skills . Being lazy with view-transition-old and...

N one of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. This unsatisfying state was a key element of Beyond… Source N one of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us ...

When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES , I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural renderings with motion. HuggingFace and Pollen robotics sent me a Reachy Mini to test, and, well, at least if you're looking to replicate that setup in the keynote, it's not, as Jensen put it, "utterly trivial now." When I saw J...

I saw Proust’s questionnaire on James' Blog and I thought I should try it out. Funnily enough I got Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" as audiobook CDs for my birthday, because I thought it was funny that there was actually an audiobook. It's 7 days long, btw. Read more on the site… I saw Proust’s questionnaire on James' Blog and I thought I should try it out. Funnily enough I got Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" as audiobook CDs for my birthday, because I thought it w...

In Caddy the syntax is different: https://www.redblobgames 301 } Now it will 301-redirect " https://www.redblobgames/) " to " https://www.redblobgames/ ". For both of these web servers, I never remember what characters need to be escaped, and I kind of wish I could use existing programming language syntax with delimiters like /^(.*)[;:,.)]$/ or r'^(.*)[;:,.)]$' . In Caddy the syntax is different: https://www.redblobgames 301 } Now it will 301-redirect...

I thought that 2025 was weird and didn't think it could get much weirder. 2026 is really delivering in the weirdness department. An AI agent opened a PR to matplotlib with a trivial performance optimization, a maintainer closed it for being made by an autonomous AI agent, so the AI agent made a callout blogpost accusing the matplotlib team of gatekeeping . This provoked many reactions: Aoi What. Why? How? What? Are we really at the point where AI agents make callou...

A PSLV rocket, and its fairing being prepared pre-launch. One human on the bottom right of the left image for scale. Images: ISRO The January 12 launch of India’s PSLV rocket failed due to the third stage’s mysteriously anomalous performance, the resulting tumbling of which was visible even on telemetry screens in the mission control and livestream. 16 spacecraft were lost to the air and sea, spanning a key national hyperspectral satellite , seven private Indian ones, five from Brazil,...

I’ve been building SkySpottr (my first “real” app), an AR app that overlays aircraft information on your phone’s screen using your device’s location, orientation, and incoming aircraft data (ADS-B) to predict where planes should appear on screen, then uses a YOLO model to lock onto the actual aircraft and refine the overlay. YOLOv8 worked great for this… until I actually read the license. Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we train from scratch entire neural networks to...

As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to "Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities" - this has actual legal weight to it as the IRS can use it to evaluate if the organization is sticking to its mission and deserves to maintain its non-profit tax-exempt status. You can browse OpenAI's tax filings by year on ProPublica's excellent Nonprofit Explorer . I ...

I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not has as much time as I’d hoped to share more thoughts from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat . I’m still working through my notes and posting fragments - here are some more:  ❄                ❄ What role do senior developers play as LLMs become established? As befits a gathering of many senior developers, we felt we sti...

Historically, writing code was slower than reviewing code. It might not have felt that way, because code reviews sat in queues until someone got around to picking it up. But if you compare the actual acts themselves, creation was usually the more expensive part. In teams where people both wrote and reviewed code, it never felt like “we should probably program slower.” So when more and more people tell me they no longer know what code is in their own codebase, I feel like something is v...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with David Cain, whose blog can be found at raptitude.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by C Jackdaw and the other 116 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I’m ...

A reader worried about the future. I am writing this email as a young aspiring researcher/scientist. We live in a period of uncertainty and I have a lot of doubts about the decisions I should make. I've always been interested in mathematics and physics and I believe that a career in this area would be a fulfilling one for me. However, with the development of AI I'm starting to have some worries about my future. It is difficult to understand what is really happening. It feels like everyday these ...

I am quite content to be alone except on a mild evening at twilight.  During the quick hours of the day I am busy. Busy with things I enjoy doing, for the most part. Or busy with people I enjoy being around. I count myself among the luckiest alive.  During the night I am dreaming. Night is dreaming time whether I am asleep or awake. The dreams are all mine. I stretch out in the bed and in my mind. I  never had such space before. Even in my childhood, my dreams were so small, so bordered. ...

Recently I have started going Raw+DC on my databases . I think I love it. Let me explain. TL;DR; After 25+ years championing ORMs, I’ve switched to raw database queries paired with Python dataclasses. I’m calling it the Raw+DC pattern . The result: better AI coding assistance, fewer aging dependencies, comparable or better performance, and type safety where it counts. ORM/ODM Raw+DC Pattern Type safety...

Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. Start here if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Pi...

Our old apartment had one of those Leasam late 1990s air conditioning controllers that not only operated in a nonsensical way, but would constantly manage to lock itself to a specific temperature with no way to adjust it. I grew up in Southeast Asia, and used dozens of controllers, remotes, thermostats, and other such devices for residential and industrial air conditioners. This was—and remains—the only class of controller to stymie me. Which is surprising, given how superficially simp...

Hivemind autonomy software will fly aboard Anduril’s Fury (YFQ-44A)   WASHINGTON (February 13, 2026) — Shield AI, the deep ‑ tech company building state ‑ of ‑ the ‑ art autonomy software products and aircraft, today announced its selection as a mission autonomy provider supporting the U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Shield AI was selected following a competitive evaluation to support mission autonomy Technology Maturity and Risk Reduction (TMRR) e...

I was listening to a recent episode of The Rest is Science (fantastic Podcast, by the way - go listen), and in this particular episode Michael and Hannah were discussing boredom. At one point in the episode, Michael mentions an experiment where Dutch scientists put a hamster wheel out in the wild. The theory goes that we humans put a wheel in the hamster cage to provide the little guy with some stimulation, as they can't go running around the woods any more. But the experiment had some i...

It was Matthew Arnold who first dubbed Oxford as “the city of dreaming spires.” It really is a magical place.  A place with strong ties to fantasy.   To Philip Pullman, Alan Garner, William Morris, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman, and of course the Inklings, among them C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.   A grand company.  Understandably, I was honored when I was invited to return there in November, to address the Oxford Union, and sign a few books. I spoke on November 4, to a full hous...

Reviving manufacturing doesn't require a planned economy, just a better business model.  ... Read More Reviving manufacturing doesn't require a planned economy, just a better business model.  ... Read More Reviving manufacturing doesn't require a planned economy, just a better business model.  ... ... Read More Read More

Here's a story I tell my mentees often—and it's one where I almost made an expensive mistake. A few years ago, my team was tasked with rebuilding the authentication system for one of our core products. We walked into that room with a massive assumption already locked and loaded: "Authentication isn't our core business. We should buy, not build." It made perfect sense on paper. We assumed buying a vendor solution like Auth0 would be faster, safer, and cheaper. We assumed building it oursel...